SEO Category Pages – WHY they’re important and HOW to optimize them.

This post may contain affiliate links. Read the disclosure for more info.

Yesterday I chatted with SEO guru and millionaire blogger Grant Sabatier about the HUGE role that site structure plays in Google SEO, and he gave solid tips for optimizing your SEO category pages, site taxonomy, category descriptions, etc. This post shares WHY it’s important, and WHAT you can do to better organize your site! You can also listen to this blog post on \\ iTunes \\ Stitcher \\ Google Play \\ Overcast \\ Spotify

Grant dropped an SEO bomb on me yesterday.

I haven’t stopped thinking about it, and I’ve been itching to dive into my own blog and implement it.

Blog 2, named WeLoveGardening.com, 5 categories (one of which is “Tomato Tips”), 35 posts on general gardening tips, 10 posts specifically about tomatoes, all categorized under “tomato tips.”

All other things being equal, Google is going to see blog 2 as being MUCH more relevant to tomato tips, and it is likely to rank higher.

Here’s another example:

If you’re in personal finance, and primarily blog about budgeting, you might have…

5 posts on grocery budgets

7 posts on budgeting tools

6 posts on saving money on car insurance

etc.

If tomorrow you decide to rank the keywords “student loan forgiveness,” And it’s your only post on student loans, Google is going to look at your site and say “Wait a sec this site is about BUDGETING. Nope. Down in the search results for you.”

However, if you’ve included an entire section of your blog (under a category page titled “student loan tips” or something), with MULTIPLE blog posts about student loans, Google will be able to see that as well.

Hello, search rankings!

Ok, but why are SEO category pages important?

“Your category archives are more important than individual pages and posts.. If your site is a blog and you write several articles about a topic, your category for that topic should be #1 in the search result.”

Grant relayed the same yesterday. He said proper organization of categories and category pages make a HUGE difference for Google being able to tell what your blog is about.

Side note: Google is smarter than ever these days, and getting even smarter. More than ever before, search results are showing based on USER INTENT, Rather than fancy pancy over-optimized SEO blog posts.

This means it is absolutely CRUCIAL for Google to understand the different sections of your blog and what they are about!

Again from Yoast…

Structuring your website is crucial for both usability and findability. A lot of sites lack a decent structure to guide visitors to the product they’re looking for. Apart from that, having a clear site structure leads to better understanding of your site by Google, so it’s very important for your SEO.

Ok, so NOW we know the SEO category pages, their titles, and their descriptions are actually important (at least according to the all-powerful search engines).

So what to do about it?

Here’s how to properly set up your site structure and category pages

1 – Organize categories and limited to 8 to 10 max

Here is a screenshot of MY categories a few days ago

the “before” categories

And that wasn’t all of them. Worse yet, I know several bloggers that have over 25 to 30 different blog categories.

Per Grant, that’s wayyyy too many.

Go through your blog, And list the 5 to 10 different subjects that you blog about. These are your new blog categories. Every single thing you write should fall under them.

Better yet, do it on paper like I’ve done below (Grant emphasized this!)

Now before you go start deleting tons of old categories, It’s important to realize if you should redirect them or not.

Grant stated to use 301 redirects (i.e. permanent redirects) from old deleted pages to new relevant pages. If you would like to be dang sure you’re doing the right thing here, I’d suggest reading this short article from Yoast on deleting pages.

Now…

As you restructure and re-create your blog categories, you MUST adhere to the following….

2 – Optimize the category titles and descriptions

Go back to images ago above…and note my “beginner,” “featured,” and “essential tool” categories. These are way too broad, and if Google was just looking at these, they would have no idea that I meant BLOGGING.

As you can see in the image just above w/ my new categories, you’ll notice that they are named more appropriately to point ALL aspects of my website to BLOGGING.

Step 1 – Name your categories appropriately. Again, you want the SEO category pages to tell Google exactly what all posts in that category are about!

Step 2 – Write out a short description for each category.

This is SO stinking easy for all WordPress users, yet few bloggers have taken advantage of this.

Furthermore, You can also specify a category archive title and description (it is on the same page as the above screenshot in your category dashboard)

Just write out a 150-300 description citing what the category is actually about. Simple.

Huge Pro Tip: In the category description, LINK to your top 1-3 blog posts for the given category! This could be a great way for users to quickly find what they’re look for…keep them on your site longer (Google also loves this), etc. In general, you want your category page to LEAD users to another page on your blog. To keep reading. NOT to bounce away immediately…

3 – NO duplicate categories (or tags)

Under no circumstances should you have duplicate category names, OR have the same category and tag names for any piece of content.

Example:

You should not have “XYZ gardening post” under the “Tomato Tips” category, AND put a “tomato tips” tag with it. That is confusing to Google.

Also, you should NOT have multiple tags for that post like [tomato tips], [tomato tip], etc. No duplicate categories or tags. Easy!

4 – Go back through all of your posts and update the categories 🙂

If you’re an old blogger and screaming right now, I probably wouldn’t blame you.

It can be a pain to go back through all those blog post and edit the categories…but you tell me…would it be worth it?

Do you want your site to be found on Google more or not? Of course you do.

Luckily, you can actually use the “quick edit” on your WordPress “all posts” dashboard to quickly edit a post’s categories.

Just go back through your posts and make sure the categories are accurate and aligned to your new structure.

After the sub-categories comes actual content, please. Don’t go nuts with a crazy site structure; keep the SEO category pages clean and neat, so Google has the best chance at appropriately recognizing the different areas of your content.

So.

Get ready for the SEO traffic

This means it is now more important than EVER for Google to accurately understand what your blog is about, what different categories you cover, how many posts you’ve written for each topic, and HOW that relates to each individual post you’re aiming to rank for.

Creating a solid site structure and properly optimizing you SEO category pages and tags is step #1. Is the foundation for a well SEO optimized blog.

Want to hear more SEO tips from Grant Sabatier?

He’s an absolute master when it comes to SEO, search console, tools, and just blogging in general.

The entire podcast interview will be coming out very soon, and you should join the Do You Even Tribe newsletter to get access before everybody else finds it 🙂

Join the Do You Even Tribe...

And get exclusive blogging content that I don't even include on the blog.

Or the podcast.

I promise to only deliver high quality emails that help you GROW your blog.

Success! You're in! I am not-so-secretly celebrating in my office RIGHT NOW. In fact, I'm so excited to have you, I think I'll grab a beer right now. Not sure how that'll affect my blogging today, but who cares. You're worth it :O) Ciao!

There was an error submitting your subscription. Please try again.

First Name (or witty nickname)

Email Address

We use this field to detect spam bots. If you fill this in, you will be marked as a spammer.

Reader Interactions

Comments

Dammit Pete, every time I listen to your podcast or read your site, it creates more work for me! haha I love how you keep coming up with interesting content that will help us evolve and become better at blogging. You are Rad!

Thanks!! Big fan by the way, I think I listened to every podcast so far. Doing this right now! So just to clarify I am writing a description and putting a direct URL to other posts? Is my example correct below:
Category: Money Saving Tips
Description: This category is for articles that feature money saving tips anyone can use to save money in their own lives. Check out these posts …. (AND LIST A FEW POSTS HERE???)

Thanks for writing this! This is where my weird love of being overly organized has paid off for me. My only problem is it didn’t even come across my radar that my categories were way too broad! Seriously, think “North America.” Yikes! Luckily, I only have about 10 or so posts currently on my travel blog. Should be fairly easy to knock that out. Thanks again for the tip!

This makes so much sense. So much sense that I should’ve already done it, but clearly I need it explained to me because I have not. And I will probably put it off, because like all people, I’m bad at doing things that are good for me. This is why I love you Pete, you tell us all these bite sized golden nuggets.

Let’s, I’m very glad I came across this blog post today. Since I’m a new blogger, I’ll be able to set my blog categories up the right way. I’m going to update all of my current posts tomorrow and utilize these methods for all of my posts moving forward. Thanks a bunch!

Hi Pete,
thank you for this great post.
Personally, I think most people underestimate the value of Google’s related searches.
The ones Google recommends at the bottom.
My blog is fairly new. Although I started it last year, I haven’t been active because of moving and picked it up last month.

My main focus will be using the longer related searches that has less traffic than the most popular ones. Build my domain authority that way and eventually will rank higher too for the more competitive keywords.

And also creating longer blog posts. think of about 4000 words. And go deep into the content instead of short posts. That way it will be more shareable to my readers and I know Google loves long form content.